Kuo - Reading with Patrick: a teacher, a student, and a life-changing friendship

I went to the Mississippi Delta with a specific project: to teach American history through black literature. I imagined teaching literature that had moved me. I envisioned my students galvanized, as I had been in eighth grade, by Martin Luther King, Jr.s Letter from Birmingham Jail, and mesmerized, as I had been in high school, by Malcolm Xs autobiography. I wanted my students to read James Baldwin, who wrote about the heroic stoicism of children who walked to school through a jeering mob. Books had taught me to admire a persons will to confront the world, to evaluate his experience honestly, as Ralph Ellison wrote. Books had changed me, charged me with responsibilities. And I believed books could change the lives of my students. It was unabashedly romantic. I was twenty-two.

My own origins, I believed, were prosaic. I had grown up in western Michigan in the 1980s, the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants. I walked to school, I played piano, I crushed on my brothers friends. On the first days of snow, my brother and I took our cheap plastic saucers out for a whirl and, during the summer, our parents both at work, we dutifully advanced through booklets of practice SATs, one English and one math, each day.

In certain ways, my parents had acclimated very well to the United States. They stacked foot-high collections of Michael Jackson and Joan Baez records in the living room, voted dutifully, never missing an election, and brought home for dinner the occasional bucket of fried chicken. But in other ways, my parents seemed preoccupied by their status as outsiders. They told me cautionary tales about Asians in America being cowed, killed, and then forgotten. There was Vincent Chin, in Detroit, who in 1982 was bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat, a week before his wedding. Chin had worked in an auto industry dominated by anti-Japanese sentiment. Its because of you little motherfuckers that were out of work, the killers, both white men, had said to him. (Vincent was not Japanese but Chinese American and was born in the States.) The killers served no jail time. These werent the kind of men you send to jail, the judge stated later. You dont make the punishment fit the crime; you make the punishment fit the criminal.

The other story my parents told me was about a sixteen-year-old kid in the Deep South, somewhere in Louisianathis time, actually Japanesewhom we referred to as the Japanese exchange student. Invited to a Halloween party in the early nineties, he showed up at the wrong house, dressed in a white suit as John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. He rang the doorbell and was shot dead at point-blank range. The shooter was charged with manslaughter. He claimed at court that the kid moved in a strange way; his lawyer told the jury that the killer was protecting his property and that he was an average Joe, one of your neighbors, someone who liked sugar in his grits. He was acquitted.

Nobody will tell you these stories, my parents told me. We tell you because we want you to be careful.

Be careful: That was the central message. Like many immigrants, my parents were fearful people, and they seemed determined to remind me that tragedy might be right around the corner. It only took one ignorant guy with a gun or a baseball bat. In actual numbers, the likelihood an Asian would be murdered in the 1980s and 1990s was minimal. And yet, in a way, they were telling me something important. They were trying to tell me that we did not figure, at all, in the national imagination. Indeed, until my second year of college, I never learned about Asian Americans, alive or dead, in any class, from any teacher. As an immigrant group, we were convenient on the one hand but also, ultimately, disposable. When we did well, people would vaguely point to us as evidence of the American dream, but when we were killed for being Asian, the media wasnt interested. Our dying did not betray any myth or ideal about America. Why? Because we werent American. Our faces gave us away.